“Demons are typically there for those who summoned them.”
Dakarai N'Sehla is a pokémon trainer. Born in Togi on the 16th of April, 33 years before the active plotline, he lived much of his regular life in Njoty.
He always introduces himself as 'Rhaptor N'Sehla', if at all.
His primary historic achievement is winning in Taqnateh after doing the Sehto gym circuit (three years before the active plotline) in attempted (and probably achieved) record time, pushing both himself and his pokémon to and past exhaustion achieve this stubborn goal.
For an old draft of his experience in Taqnateh, see his written back-story. For a better canonical reference, read the logs of N'Sehla, though there sadly isn't much in-character chronological overlap, even if it showed the calculating way he trained his pokémon very well. For his death in Arsaga, see Arsaga Death.
Technically, he is partly of Xhosa heritage and the language can be considered his mother tongue, but he's equally fluent in English and only accidentally lapses into Xhosa when he's at the point of complete mental exhaustion. Being coloured certainly hasn't helped him gain respect - while the Xhosa subculture of Sehto is certainly affected by Sehto's egalitarian attitude as a whole, there are still rare groups within it that would heap scorn on him for his mixed heritage.
Dakarai N'Sehla before his fall was distinctly inhuman, having a slight autistic streak that he'd never managed to get rid of. With no empathy to guide him, he largely interacted with the world by analysing the facts he could observe, and quickly adopted a few axioms that, while it let him survive in society, also netted him the nickname Togi Demon. Most notably, he never raised a hand to harm anyone that didn't harm him first, but was utterly famous for the kind of animalistic energy he put into his self-defence, reckless and stubborn in execution, to the point where he was near impossible to deal with once in that state.
His honesty both was and is not the candid sort, instead often considered callous by those dealing with him, though he rarely means to insult anyone. Some social etiquette is best skipped with him, such as 'Do you mind if I…?', to which he frequently responds with 'I do.' Generally, asking his opinion is commonly met with a straight, unflinching answer.
He spent much of his life trying to find a way back into social standing, not comprehending his own loneliness (if it can be called such, devoid of the usual emotional pain that comes with it but nonetheless undesired), much less how to fix it, causing him to make a series of rather bad decisions.
Before Taqnateh, he used to believe he had an exceedingly good grasp of himself, granting him an alien confidence and callous arrogance when confronted by people trying to treat him as subhuman. Generally, he ended up attracting the attention of bullies and gangs for most of his time in Njoty, the interactions with who he effectively ritualised as his source of social routine.
Taqnateh violently broke him out of his tunnel vision - he certainly hadn't considered pokémon as anything but tools before Jagdish Tsukinaka and the notion that he'd broken his most important moral guideline (not to harm someone who didn't harm him first) shook him up rather badly. He's put some effort - with Jagdish's guidance - to adopt a semblance of empathy, something he's been quite successful with given the odds (he'd certainly claim he can feel people now), though he's still likely to register to people as distant even now.
Both before and after his fall, he'd rather suffer or die than back down from a position he believes in. His virtues are honesty, integrity and responsibility - though that's about the full extent of positive things that can be said about him.
He certainly has no issue giving people the impression that he's an asshole, though he doesn't deliberately aim for the effect unless a history with the person in question kicks his pride into gear. He's quite capable of being polite - social etiquette notwithstanding - and frequently is helpful to complete strangers, in stray cases even forthcoming.
He has a certain wary prejudice toward other pokémon trainers, but at least as much sympathy, and he takes recent role as Observer quite seriously.
His attire being black, featureless slacks, Rhaptor's coppery skin comes across as lighter than it is. His hair is a myriad of colours, base being a dark brown, but this being indistinguishable, as the short, flame-like hairstyle is riddled with streaks of various colours, ranging from white blond to black, with the extremes of the colour scale most numerous. His eyes seem to have no colour in particular, being brown flecked with silver and gold specks that seem in constant motion, a sliver of pale blue lancing through his left iris, a lack of pigmentation - people don't usually remember his eye-colour when attempting to describe him, or misrepresent it as black.
Post-Taqnateh, the pokémon Dakarai carries around with himself are hardly numerous:
Of those, Iris is 'his original pokémon', but both are quite free to do what they want - even leave their custom pokéballs at will.
Pre-Taqnateh, his line-up was extensive and included the following pokémon:
Of these, Fracture was his first pokémon, won in a fist-fight with Auran Collins on Njoty university's campus grounds.
Dakarai N'Sehla was born in Togi as one of the only Xhosa in the community, his parents notwithstanding. While he wasn't outcast in Togi itself - them being far too used to consisting of wildly different personalities and backgrounds to flinch at even obvious outward discrepancies - he made the error to think of Togi as his home and never truly began investing in emotional attachment to Njoty when he went to school there, which only served to make the quirks of his personality that much more apparent.
As such, he was quick to slot into the 'nerdy and emotionally fragile' category, though it was quickly clear to anyone that physically picking on him was a dangerous gamble with one's health. Picking on him from a distance was always sure to net a reaction, however, even if he quickly 'matured' to the point of making his retorts smoothly venomous. Alas, it only made him more of a challenge. He wasn't about to call for backup, after all, and his opinion of anyone didn't matter, so he still made for a good target.
After school, he never really made it out of his social niche, dragging himself from low-income job to low-income job, just about managing to keep a roof over his head (in the form of a tiny apartment), though that aspect never bothered him - he had very few material aspirations. The social issues bothered him, though, and he struggled with them, but never fixed them. He managed to shift their focus partly, but never really change their intensity.
Eventually, he got it into his head that if he tried his hand at the gym circuit, people might at least impart marginal respect toward him, and so he negotiated to fight one of his longer-term bullies, Auran Collins, for one of his pokémon, Fracture. He won her off him and started to collect and train pokémon in the area around Mount Black. His lack of preconceptions about it made him surprisingly effective, as he simply deconstructed strategy from the ground up, and outright 'corrected' pokémon perceptions about their moves, such as explaining that for Bonemerang, bones don't actually make for good boomerangs, and how to craft a better returning projectile.
Of course, Dakarai N'Sehla was never the type to want to do anything half-heartedly, and so he not only set out to best the gym circuit, he set out to do so in the minimal possible time, travel effort included. This pushed both him and his pokémon to the brink of exhaustion, but not before he (technically speaking) achieved his goal in November of that year. He took the normal Sehto gym circuit run, prepared to utmost degree with as much information about it as he could attain (and a rather sinister weapon of his design to better train his pokémon to complete obedience), and got one gym badge a day starting on the 8th (excepting an extra day travel time between Ehqaj and Kzye, with a night's slumber in Nahla City):
When he hit Taqnateh, he managed the battle by the skin of his teeth, much to Jagdish Tsukinaka's abject horror. Believing it to be wholly irresponsible for him to let Dakarai escape the fate usually reserved for those quite so cruel as he'd been, Jagdish deviated from his usual strictly consensual life-wager and incarcerated Dakarai, dragging him before the legendary Council despite his success in battle.
He noticed extremely quickly that he'd made a grave error in judgement and that his obsession had gone considerably too far. Utterly nauseated by the lucid spin on his own actions, he resolved to try and portray himself as the monster he'd been in the Council session itself, not just in actions, but in motivations as well, and succeeded in convincing the Council that he was beyond any form of redemption (an easy task to achieve, given that everyone in the Council was biased against him from the start, given the sheer severity of his actions). However, as easy as it was to keep up the pretense in the trial, it was significantly more difficult to maintain a lie of venom and uncaring under Jagdish's attention, and eventually the manipulation came to light.
Jagdish was, of course, not pleased. He didn't like Dakarai, so he was disinclined to have his sentence reduced to its fair margin - most notably, removing the death sentence that loomed ahead of him. Fortunately (or unfortunately), Jagdish's sense of professionalism and justice overrode his personal distaste, and he spoke to Solalon about the matter. A later Council session resolved the matter in Dakarai's 'favour' (even if Dakarai wasn't happy about it), and he was instead 'enslaved' to the gym circuit in the role of Observer.
Since then, his relationship with Jagdish has been increasingly friendly, to the point where the two can be considered rather intense platonic friends who would do practically anything for each other, even if outside appearances still very much suggest the strict, militaristic, hierarchic power dynamic.